love,

Thursday

Ps  Monday says hi

The Art & Tina Project

The Art & Tina Project

The Art & Tina Project

http://artandtina.dustinohara.com/

“And I”ve turned back to William Basinski’s incredible piece The Disintegration Loops, the story of which (especially with its 9/11 postscript) so aptly sums up this decade:

“In the process of archiving and digitizing analog tape loops from work I had done in 1982, I discovered some wonderful sweeping pastoral pieces I had forgotten about. Beautiful, lush cinematic truly American pastoral landscapes swept before my ears and eyes. With excitement I began recording the first one to CD, mixing a new piece with a subtle random arpeggiated countermelody from the Voyetra. To my shock and surprise, I soon realized that the tape loop itself was disintegrating: as it played round and round, the iron oxide particles were gradually turning to dust and dropping into the tape machine, leaving bare plastic spots on the tape, and silence in these corresponding sections of the new recording. I had heard about this happening, and frankly was very afraid of this happening to me since so much of my early work was precariously near the end of its shelf life. Still, I had never actually seen it happen, yet here it was happening. The music was dying. I was recording the death of this sweeping melody. It was very emotional for me, and mystical as well. Tied up in these melodies were my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently,gracefully, beautifully. Life and death were being recorded here as a whole: death as simply a part of life: a cosmic change, a transformation. When the disintegration was complete,the body was simply a little strip of clear plastic with a few clinging chords, the music had turned to dust and was scattered along the tape path in little piles and clumps. Yet the essence and memory of the life and death of this music had been saved: recorded to a new media, remembered”

A friend of mine recently tweeted that as the Internet continues to evolve, filters are going to rise in importance.  At first I didn’t really get it.  But the more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes.

Thanks to the Internet, information is being created and duplicated at an exponential rate.  Because of this, people are going to need more and more efficient ways to filter through and access information.   Google is an amazing filter.  In seconds you are put in touch with a webpage, an image, a video, a book, almost anything you can think of.  However, Google does lack strength in it’s ability to serve up rich data.  This is where Wolfram comes into play. When items are searched for in Wolfram.  The results are served up as raw data rather than sending you to links, reports, and academic papers.

Wolfram as an amazing tool for searching for data within fields of medicine, mathematics, science, etc.  The powerful search engine is quickly able to process searches like France GDP divided by Italy, or molecular weight of caffeine divided by water.  I’ve tried searching Google scholar before but it usually directs me to documents and not to the specific information I”m looking for.  Wolfram seems to be serving specific raw data as equations, graphs and conversion tables.  Unfortunately Wolfram isn’t available yet but their website said they’ll be up this month.  I can’t wait.

To my surprise I have also found twitter to be an amazing Internet filter.  Humans comb the Internet for anything that is appealing to them and then broadcast what they find to their followers.  But it doesn’t end there.  Users then have the ability to re-tweet information and talk about what they find.  Conversations about Swine Flu, Apple and Star Trek are trending on Twitter as I’m typing.  What results is the media on the Internet, and the twitter posts about that media, blend into an indistinguishable narrative of what is occurring in real time.  Thus the Internet is simultaneously being created and re-created.

These filters all enable us to sort through the ocean that is the Internet and find what we want.  Luckily, this is only the beginning.  Filters are only going to become more and more advanced as technology continues to evolve and create more and more information.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/04/27/us/20090427-flu-update-graphic.html